In a secure lab in Texas, five machines are purring away quietly. Working through the night, these boxes churn out billions of malformed proteins. A seemingly odd thing to mass-produce, these distorted molecules are at the heart of research into a family of diseases that destroy the brain. The equipment was devised by Clau-dio Soto, a biologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who works on prion protein, a naturally occurring molecule. Misfolded versions of this protein are thought to cause conditions such as mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Such abnormal prions are infectious and, when ingested, make their way to the brain, where they slowly distort the natural prion proteins, causing disease and, ultimately, death.
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